Floating City Page 3

  He longed to go home, but by the second or third night, the truth was he didn’t want to go just yet. He was warm and dry, and cared for in ways he never had been. The Ladies fed him thick, meaty stew and there was always more, as much as he wanted. They bathed him in hot, hot water with lavender soap, being gentle but attentive around his backside, barely touching the spot, which they called a hemorrhage. They oh-so-lightly dabbed balm on the bruise as he lay on his stomach in the warm, dry bed he had all to himself.

  “The hemorrhaging!” Miss McCracken softly cried. When she leaned down, the soft folds of her fell so close and her Jesus swung from the chain at her neck. “Who did this to you, dear Francis? Such a blow.”

  Frankie stayed silent.

  “He’s afraid to say.”

  “Was it your father? Were you running to escape him?”

  “The dark of it means it’s healing,” said Miss Hawks. “The bleeding inside has stopped.”

  “You’re safe here with us.”

  “We’ve told no one.”

  They combed his hair, exclaiming over its blackness and thickness. “Like a horse’s mane.”

  What he liked less was the schooling, in all things. He was seated at a desk with a pillow on the chair for his backside and made to practise his penmanship and to read about Jesus who, like the Priest, could heal the sick. Frankie was also taught how to set a proper table, how to use a fork and a knife, and how to eat soup with a spoon without slurping. He cringed at the cold ting of metal on his teeth and tongue.

  The days passed. A week. He missed his mother. She would be worried; Aki would be worried, almost as much as if it were Yas gone. The others might worry too, a little.

  One night, Frankie awoke to find Miss McCracken kneeling by his bed, her hands clasped, eyes squeezed shut. She was murmuring. O heavenly Father. She was babbling, like his mother clutching her prayer beads.

  Watch with us over your child Francis. Grant that he may be restored to that perfect health which it is yours alone to give…through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

  “It’s still there,” said Miss McCracken the next morning. “Shouldn’t we—?”

  “We shall wait a few more days, then call the doctor.”

  Frankie had only once seen the spot’s reflection in a small cloudy mirror his mother held for him. He knew it would stay, and blacker than ever.

  * * *

  —

  Tiny Jesus on the wall was silent. Did not even shush Frankie now. Only the Ladies spoke to him. Jesus died for your sins. God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son.

  What did that mean?

  Frankie looked straight at him, pinned there by nails in his little hands and feet. It was the Priest, the Priest who’d given up Frankie, left him to the world. Begotten. Forgotten.

  In a drawer beside his bed, he found a round gold case. A compact with a mirror inside and a crescent of pressed pink powder. It smelled of sweet flowers that had dried in their vase. He stared at himself in the mirror. When would his mother come for him?

  Now that another week had begun, he was ready to go home. When the Ladies left him alone, he took out the compact. He dabbed the pale powder with his fingers and then patted his backside where he thought the spot lay.

  A knock came at the door and after a moment, the Ladies entered, followed by a man. A man with a doctor’s bag, who removed his hat as he came in. It took Frankie a moment to realize he was Japanese. Better dressed than any Japanese he’d ever seen in Port Alberni, and taller, with a neatly trimmed moustache.

  “Francis, this is Dr. Kuwabara.”

  The doctor gestured to Frankie at his desk to lie down on the bed. He felt his pants carefully drawn down and knew it was Miss McCracken’s gentle fingers at work. He knew she was pointing with them at the hemorrhage, then covering her open mouth as she winced.

  The doctor cleared his throat. “It’s not a bruise or hemorrhage.”

  “Not a bruise?” Miss McCracken said. “Then what?”

  Frankie straightened his pants and sat up. The scent of the powder filled the air.

  “A Mongolian spot.”

  “Will it spread?”

  “Is it contagious?” Miss McCracken took a step back.

  Dr. Kuwabara donned his hat. “No. It usually disappears by age four or five. There is no injury, no internal bleeding.”

  “I’ve never heard of such a thing,” said Miss Hawks.

  “It only occurs among certain tribes,” the doctor said.

  “Mongolians?”

  The doctor nodded. “And others. The boy can return home safely.” He tipped his hat and went out, followed by Miss Hawks.

  Miss McCracken bent down in front of Frankie. “Oh, Francis.” She touched his cheek and left.

  * * *

  —

  Frankie was surprised to discover that the house he’d been in all this time sat on a normal street with other houses nearby. He was in Alberni, Port Alberni’s inland sister town.

  Out they stepped, the three of them, Miss Hawks on one side and Miss McCracken holding his hand on the other. The air seemed warmer as if a season had passed. The Ladies looked different out in daylight: they were specked with bits of colour, freckles and moles under the brims of their hats. He wanted to free his hand, his hot hand from Miss McCracken’s in its white glove. But she held tight as they walked. The odd person passed, some looking twice at the threesome.

  The houses on the road grew farther apart until there were no more. They came to a school where children lived without their parents. It was set back from the road, newly built of orange brick, three storeys high.

  Now a boy ventured near. “Hello,” the boy said. He looked Frankie up and down. “Hello, brother.” His white shirt was buttoned to the top the way the Ladies had dressed Frankie. The boy came closer to Miss Hawks with hand outstretched, tapping his palm with a finger.

  “Shoo,” said Miss Hawks. “Back to class. We have nothing to give you.”

  * * *

  —

  “Is it my brother?” Aki asked breathlessly, but the Ladies swept through the door with only a nod of their heads. Even after rowing halfway across the inlet, the sparkling brightness of their prim blouses and sweet lavender scent showed up the dank grime of the room, living room, bedroom, kitchen all in one. Entering behind them, Frankie smelled its odours as more pungent and sour than ever before.

  “Frankie!” Aki hugged him tightly. Then Yas, Julia and Augusta. They looked at him as if he’d changed.

  The Ladies removed their hats and gloves. “You are the missus?”

  Momoye stepped meekly before the Ladies with bowed head, hands folded. Behind her, Taiji swayed a bit and rubbed his eyes. A bottle of Canadian Club lay in one corner. It was Friday morning after Thursday payday.

  “Hanesaka,” said Aki.

  “Mrs. Handsacker,” repeated Miss Hawks. Julia and Augusta giggled.

  “We are from the Sisters of Mercy Mission. Do you understand English?”

  Their mother nodded and shook her head at the same time. She understood enough to barter for eggs and milk in town, but that was all. How small and swarthy she looked before the Ladies. Her brows that could arch so sternly were still, even drooped.

  “We found your son by the water,” Miss Hawks said. “Unconscious. Smelling of liquor.”

  “And injured!” added Miss McCracken with a downward glance. “We fed him and bathed him. We took care of him.” She was trembling beside Frankie, blinking.

  “He come home,” Momoye said, looking startled at the sound of herself in English. “Senku.”

  “She means, thank you,” Julia piped in.

  Momoye reached for Frankie and pulled him beside her, fingers biting into his arm.

  “Your son,” said Miss McCracken, taking a deep breath, “bears marks.” She cupped her own backside lurking beneath layers of pleated cloth. “Hemorrhaging!”

  Miss Hawks patted her friend’s hand. “Yes, but the Japanese doctor sa
ys he’s healed now.”

  “Yes, yes,” said Momoye, gripping him tightly. His arm pinched.

  Miss McCracken studied each child in turn, then cast a long glance at Frankie. “We are here for you should you need us.” She placed a card on the table and her voice softened. “Goodbye, Francis.”

  Now Augusta waltzed before the Ladies of the Sisters of Mercy; she swept one leg behind the other and bent low for her audience. “I, Augusta Handsacker, a lady of the Sisters of Curtsy, thank you.”

  Momoye would not unclench her iron hold until the splash of the Ladies’ paddles and the groan of their wooden boat faded into the distance. She turned to him, raised her hand and smacked him hard. “Stupid boy!”

  He stumbled back.

  “What if they didn’t let you come home?”

  Everyone was silent. He was grateful now for not being able to cry. He stayed close to his mother, his arm numb and cheek stinging. He was close enough to see the quiver beneath her eye.

  “Yes, Mama.”

  He felt stranger in his family now than the stranger he’d already thought himself to be. Even with his mother. She had never struck any of her children before.

  Momoye beckoned for him to sit by her chair. Augusta crouched beside him and touched his white shirt. He unbuttoned the collar and took a deep breath. It was made for a smaller boy.

  “Were there lots of cookies to eat, Francis?” she giggled.

  “We looked for you,” Aki said, crawling to the other side of him. “All night and all day, then all night again, and all over again.” Her eye rolled and glistened as if it could see everything. Yet they hadn’t found him. He’d been sure that they would, that a knock would come at the door of the Ladies’ house or at the window to his room. Or that his mother would barge right in without knocking and bring him home. He’d never panicked, never doubted, neither he nor tiny Jesus on the wall.

  But they hadn’t come. They hadn’t looked hard enough. Not as hard as they would’ve if Yas had disappeared.

  “Did they hurt you?”

  Frankie shook his head.

  * * *

  —

  Now he knew the name for it: Mongolian spot.

  That night, Julia and Augusta folded down Frankie’s bed-sheets like nurses; they tugged his waistband and giggled away. They scrubbed at the spot with a cloth while Frankie pretended to sleep. It was a well of blood deep down that couldn’t be mopped up. It was meant to be and to stay. Just as Yas was meant to be free of it. That’s why he was stronger than Frankie. That was how he could take more than two swigs of Taiji’s whisky and stay standing, how he could ride the Colossus.

  When they left him, Frankie twisted his arm around to touch his backside. It felt like the rest of him; no bumps or ridges. It tingled. Miss McCracken’s gentle hands had exposed it to the cold air, she and Miss Hawks staring where they should not. He hadn’t tried to stop them. In fact, he’d lain there with his face buried in the sweet-smelling pillow, on the soft bed, limp. He burned with shame, his Mongolian spot now hot with sweat. Beside and around him, his family slumbered on. Frankie slipped out of bed and went to his mother’s chair. Why hadn’t she come for him? He wept then, his kind of weeping, quiet and dry.

  May Jesus walk with you, Miss McCracken had said; Jesus, who was pinned to a wall in an empty room. No, it was the Priest who walked with Frankie, another misfit follower like the Peach Man or the Hunchback. He was the one with the Mongolian spot that would not go away, and the Priest was with him as ever, in water and on land, maybe even through fire, for good or ill.

  * * *

  —

  In spite of his mother, Frankie did go out after dark. He rowed off on his own whenever he woke in the night, which was often. He rowed past the shore where the Ladies had found him. He rowed with the sawdust burner eating fire in the dark by the mill. Each time he saw it, he was reminded of the Priest’s fire-walking, his feet blackened but unburnt. He rowed, his muscles strengthened and strained, so as not to be pulled down between the logs again, and to never be so weak he could be carted off by two small ladies.

  One night, as he rose to leave the house, he almost tripped over Aki lying face down to the floorboards. “Let me come with you,” she whispered. He shook his head but she got up anyway, her Cyclops eye staring him down.

  The waxing moon lit up the sky, the mountains under it a far-off rolling wave. Aki skimmed the water with her fingers and leaned over. “There are creatures so far down no one ever sees.”

  Frankie rowed for a time, then stopped. “That’s where they found me.”

  “The Ladies?”

  He nodded.

  They pulled the boat ashore. Frankie held up the lantern as if to find the ghost outline of himself there on the ground.

  They followed the road out of Port Alberni, reversing the steps he’d taken with the Ladies. Frankie swung the lantern from the road in front to the shiny black snake of a creek alongside it. A hum came from somewhere just ahead. Was it an owl, a wolf? No, it was a song that rose up and drifted down, a girl’s voice that wavered and thrummed the air. The trees and bushes fell away on one side to reveal the school he’d passed with the Ladies, three storeys high. Windows glowed on the first and second floors. The humming girl sat on a bench outside.

  She looked up when they approached. “I’m Mary,” she said. Then she pulled her gown tight to her softly swelled belly. “This is Daisy,” she whispered. She was not much older than Aki; she even looked like her but with two dark glistening eyes and straight black hair cut to her chin. She wasn’t Japanese or Chinese; she was Indian. She was turning a piece of wood between her fingers. The wood was hollowed out with four nails tapped into its top. Bit by bit the girl looped red yarn around the head of each one, then hooked one strand over the next to release a web that spiralled inward. The wood turned easily in her hand, loops dropping; a knitted red tube emerged out the bottom from the hollow centre, worming into the girl’s lap.

  A bell rang and a man’s voice boomed inside from above. “Lights out!”

  Beside them, a window creaked open and three boys tumbled out, all barefoot in white gowns like ghouls of the night. Another window opened and they clambered in. The girl sprang to her feet and slipped through the same window the boys had come out from. The piece of wood dropped behind her, landing at their feet, its red tail in the dirt.

  Frankie and Aki walked on. One house appeared set back from the road among trees, then another. Then more, side by side. Small frame houses. Was it this one, or that? A block farther, there it was: the window from which he’d watched for Momoye, framed by its lace curtains. No lights were on.

  “That’s the place?” Aki whispered. She took a deep breath. It was small but neat as a doll’s house. And dark: no one home or all asleep. Frankie crept closer to the window. He wanted to see tiny Jesus on the wall, waiting. But Aki grabbed his arm and yanked him back, her eye fearful. “What if they take you again?”

  * * *

  —

  Back in Port Alberni, they passed their school, Eighth Avenue Elementary. Their crisp steps echoed in the night. Argyle Street was empty and blank. They walked past the shop where, Aki explained, she and their mother once bought chicks in a little carton with a bag of feed. The chicks had squawked and squawked. Aki had put her finger to their squealing beaks. Two chicks soon curled into limp balls. “Mama tossed them into the ditch there,” she said, pointing. Left for dead.

  They went up the hill to the grand blocks where the rich white people lived. Frankie showed Aki the grandest house with the turret and the garden shrouded in shadows. He tried to tell her how glorious the flowers were by day, in sunlight: the colours and smells.

  “They’re asleep now,” Aki whispered. Only she would think of such a thing, of flowers closing their eyes at night.

  “If there’s seven of us in our house,” Frankie asked, “how many do you think could fit there? Seventy?” The two of them stared up at the darkened turret.

  “One da
y, Rapunzel will let down her hair to you, Frankie,” Aki told him. He turned away from her knowing eye.

  Now the dark was tinged with more morning than night. Frankie led his sister to a maple tree that stood alone and above Main Street, whose thick limbs he’d straddled once or twice to watch the Rose Queen Parade. There were the lights of the Arlington Hotel and, leading from it, the path followed by the Rose Queen and her procession. The day of the parade was always sunny, and the crown glinted on a head of blond or brown curls like an eclipse he must not look at.

  He hoisted his sister up. Some coins fell from his pocket. “Where’d you get those?” Aki asked.

  “Never mind,” Frankie said, scrambling to pick them up. He pointed out the fiery light of the sawdust burner at the mill. They watched the glow fade as the sun brightened the sky. He glanced back to the grand houses they’d passed. “The men who own the mill live up there.” Though he didn’t know that for a fact.

  They turned to the crooked rows of shabby dwellings and bunkhouses below them.

  “There we are,” Aki piped in. Beyond the harbour, where the fishing boats were moored, their house bobbed all on its own.

  “One day, I’m going to build a house with a turret,” Frankie declared. He wanted to tell Aki all about the floating hotel and the flower garden. But no, he’d surprise them. He’d surprise them all.

  CHAPTER 3

  Floating Garden

  “Lively Dancer,” he shouted into the ear of one elderly bachelor. Frankie pranced in a circle, kicking his knees high. Then he reared his head up like a horse. “To win,” he said, “to win.”

  The man slowly nodded. He dug into his pocket and tossed Frankie a coin.

  Each week, Frankie visited the bunkhouses at the edge of town to offer newly arrived bachelor loggers and elderly cooks a list of horses to win, place or show at the racetrack in Vancouver. He pantomimed his best Quick Step or Lightning. He placed the bets and took a percentage if they won. The men could neither read the papers nor understand the radio, but they wanted to place more and more bets to double their chances to go home for good with pockets full.